Last night's dinner was just nibbles, a tray of cold vegetables with a garlic-dill dip to snack on while watching the Grammys, and to save myself a trip to the garage I opened the only white in the kitchen's wine cooler that wasn't a special occasion wine: a 2016 Donnhoff Trocken.
I don't have much experience at all with deliberately dry German rieslings, it's a very recent interest spurred by the fact that I did genuinely fall in love with some Pewsey Vale dry rieslings out of Australia. This is the second of two bottles. So first things first: the first bottle, drunk about two months ago, had the tiniest bit of effervescence. A little spritz usually strikes me as an additional texture, but not something that took away flavor, however this un-fizzed bottle was richer and more complex and has me wondering. It tasted like a $20 wine (or better) where the first did not. Second thing, I would not normally reach for riesling to serve with a raw vegetables. But it worked admirably well with everything on the platter and was particularly killer with the naturally sweet blanched asparagus. Move over Sancerre.
